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12/30/14

In between the Holidays, I managed to find a little time to do some extra tinkering in the shop, Since I was between works, I decided to see if I could whip up something small in the short amount of time that I had available to me. Fresh off of my last piece, I decided to play around with some of the visual concepts from that particular sculpture.

So going for extra credit ( I had not planned on finishing anything else this year), I came up with this design, which for all intents and purposes is the little brother of EP631. A number of people had commented on the high polish detail from that previous piece and so I thought it might be a good exercise to single out that particular element for a small work like this.

The design was tricky going at first, the sculpture consists of only three individual parts, all quite small, so it took about eight iterations to get it sketched out in way that I could reasonably expect to be able to build it. Looking back on it now it seems fairly simple, but I guess that is the hallmark of good design.

I did not bother with an elaborate blue print this time, just quick sketches (for me anyway) . So here is the drawing I ended up with before beginning work.

9/22/14

This new piece is a bit of a departure from some of my more recent works. Standing 12" tall and an 8" diameter at the base, it is my first Rectangular format piece in quite some time, but it also has some other elements that are harder to explain that make it unique.

The foundation for this work grew out of a Tessellated style drill pattern I had worked up for a cube shaped piece. But not wanting to be completely "boxed-in" to a rigid formulaic design, I used it only as a starting point so that things could evolve considerably from there.

As things developed, I started working with the pin system that you see connecting the top and bottom half in the finished work. If interlocking pins were going to be a dominant visual characteristic in the work, I wanted them to also supply some sort of functionality as well. As ever, I was trying to work the form and function thing from both ends and it played out well this time.

Made entirely of aluminum and brass, I opted not to clear coat the brass, I was dealing with a lot of tight sliding fits, and some of the pins would be under load as they would be holding the top half to the base. Both of those situations could lead to scratching and cracking to any finish, so I decided it was better to let the brass age naturally. I would rather embrace that fact than risk any cracked clear coating ruining the work.

8/18/14

As I often mention in my posts, I try to incorporate both engineering and creative concepts into each of my designs. It is really important to me that my works are in some small way grounded in something more concrete like an engineering challenge. I enjoy the constraints it imparts and it also gives me something tangible to talk about with the work. I find the aesthetic decisions I make for any given work are nearly impossible to articulate in a way that makes sense to other people, so its nice to have a side to the work that is less tricky to share.

The catalyst for this piece came from the interlocking spoke assemblage you see below.

This assembly was conceived of while working on another project. At the time it did not fit with what I was doing, so I saved that idea, and used it as the technical foundation for designing this work. It took many tries to get this arrangement to both function properly and look interesting to me. But once I had resolved this element, the rest of the piece slowly took shape around it.

Material wise, I've been really into using bronze lately, it machines well and is somewhat scratch resistant. I love its color and how it eventually turns a nice warm brown with a little age. It also goes really well with the aluminum and so the bulk of this sculpture is constructed out of either aluminum or bronze, with just a few small details made out of Stainless steel. The orange details in this work are anodized aluminum as well.

Unable to find bronze tubing in the proper size, I was forced to make the large pieces in the legs out of solid bar stock, which contributes a great deal to the weight of this piece.

The drawing this time around is a bit of an evolution over previous ones, as I have started to abandon the contained rectangular format. when laying this one out, I realized how unnecessary a rigid border was when trying to create something visually interesting, and so I intentionally broke through it in a few places with unexpectedly positive results.

Now that this drawing has set a precedent, I have a lot of new ideas on where future drawings may be able to take this farther.

There are a lot more angles and images below, as well as process shots. So please enjoy.

6/24/14

It has been a little while since my last post, spring brought with it a few home projects, trips, and art obligations that all conspired to slow things down in the shop for a little while. But with the distractions now out of the way and production getting back to normal, I am happy to post pictures of my newest work.

4/24/14

Hello everyone, Some news and new work. Here is my effort for April. It is a nice medium sized work made of Aluminum and bronze, it stands 8.75" tall by 7.625" wide and 6" deep at the base.

The main element for this piece was borrowed from a much older design that was giving me a lot of trouble. It just wasn't going anywhere, so I salvaged the useful elements and reworked it until I arrived at this rather unexpected ( for me anyway ) form.

Drawing a design is always one thing, but building it is another thing entirely. This was a technically very complicated shape to create, I spent nearly as much time planning the process I would use to create the parts as I did actually making the parts themselves.

People often ask me if CNC tools make complicated shapes easier to produce. I always answer "yes and no" and this piece is a great example of why I give that answer. The three main Aluminum elements in this design were complex to the point that there was no reasonable way to cut them without using a CNC machine. On the other hand, because they were geometrically complicated and at the same time, one of a kind, I could not trust any of my usual automated processes for generating the tool paths for the milling machine.

The CADCAM programs I have work well for simpler parts, but because the work had to be rotated many times and had multiple overlapping facets, I had to create the tool paths the old fashioned way. And so I ended up spending two days checking geometry, plotting coordinates, and writing the entire G code program line by line, all by hand. It was a tedious task, and it was certainly by no means easy.

3/23/14

This months Diptych is sort of a dovetail from last months edition of spherical works. Often when planning pieces I will arrive at a point where a decision can take the work in two very different directions. Usually, I can only choose one of those directions, but since I have been working smaller as of late, I decided to preserve some of those decision by allowing the work to split into a couple of different designs.

These are two sketches that diverged from last months project and then again from each other. I decided they were both worth building.

When approaching the blue prints for these pieces, It occurred to me that the small pieces by themselves presented too limited a number of parts to create anything interesting as far as a drawing composition, so I thought given the relationship of these three pieces, a composite print was both appropriate and also a nice challenge of its own.

I abandoned a few of my older line making conventions for the boarder on this one and will probably continue to do so as I start experimenting more and more with the image making part of these prints, as apposed to the technical accuracy portion.

The Dimensions on this pair are as follows, they each sweep out about a 4" Diameter circle and are about 2.75" top to bottom.